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When President Donald Trump announced he’d try to halt funding for the new Gateway train tunnels under the Hudson River last month, he billed it as retaliation against Democrats for the federal government shutdown. Instead, the move became a political albatross that hurt New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial candidate.

In Tuesday’s New Jersey’s governor’s race, Democrat Mikie Sherrill whooped GOP candidate Jack Ciattarelli with more than 56% of the vote. Ciattarelli had spent the campaign supporting Trump, and failed to separate himself from the president after the White House threatened funding for the $16 billion tunnel effort, the largest public works project in the country and a long-sought solution to the single, antiquated tube to New York City for Garden State train commuters.

“Jack Ciattarelli’s line throughout the campaign would be that he supported everything Trump was doing,” said Dan Cassino,  professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. “But if Trump were to do anything that would hurt New Jersey, of course he would stand up for New Jersey.”

When Trump first threatened to halt the flow of upwards of $6.8 billion in federal subsidies for the project, Ciattarelli didn’t speak up. Only when Trump then said he would kill the project altogether did Ciattarelli chime in with a post on X that he would “fight to get it done.”

“This is something that was very clearly hurting New Jersey and Ciattarelli was not able to say, ‘Oh, I'm going to stand up to Trump in this case,’” Cassino said.

Recent polls suggest riding on Trump’s popularity wasn’t a winning strategy in New Jersey this year. Only 40% of likely New Jersey voters approve of the way Trump is “handling his job as president,” while 56% of likely voters disapprove, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll.

Still, Republicans eyed the governor’s race as an opportunity after Kamala Harris won less than 52% of the state’s vote in last year’s presidential election.

Threatening the Gateway tunnel may have also given many New Jersey voters deja vu. Back in 2010, former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, abruptly yanked his state’s funding for the ARC project, which also aimed to build new rail tunnels beneath the Hudson River. If that project had gone forward as scheduled, it would’ve been completed by now.

Sherrill credited Trump’s meddling on Gateway with helping sway voters.

“When Trump said he was going to terminate the Gateway tunnel project, thousands of New Jerseyans spoke to me about how important that was to not just their quality of life, but their hopes for opportunity and jobs,” Sherrill told NPR on Wednesday morning.

Gateway officials say the new tunnels are necessary to close and repair the existing 115-year-old Hudson River train tunnels, which were damaged in 2012 during Hurricane Sandy. The new tubes could also one day allow for more rail service between New Jersey and Manhattan, but that boost hinges on the redevelopment of Penn Station that the Trump administration seized control of earlier this year.

Cassino didn’t think the Gateway issue was the main issue that swayed voters in North Jersey, who already lean heavily Democratic, but said the issue may have helped juice Sherrill’s numbers.

“I think it probably helped with turnout, we did see turnout in those areas and Essex County, Union County really go up in this cycle,” Cassino said, adding that Essex County cast 20% more votes than during the 2021 election.

While Sherrill won the election this week, the future of the Gateway project is still in Trump’s hands. The Regional Plan Association's Tom Wright, who’s lobbied for the project for a decade, wasn’t worried.

“ I think that the Gateway project is ultimately going to be a win for Trump, and he's going to see that,” Wright said. “He may use it as a bargaining chip in whatever negotiations are ongoing with the leadership of both New Jersey and New York, but at the end of the day, this project is going to be something that he wants to put his name on, his stamp on.”

The project isn’t expected to be completed for another decade, long after Trump is slated to leave the White House.

NYC transportation news this week

The school bus saga. An agreement between education officials and school bus companies means there won’t be an immediate crisis for some of the city’s 150,000 yellow bus riders, but it's unclear if the deal will address notoriously poor service. Parents have complained for years about absurdly long routes, as well as buses that show up hours late or not at all for weeks or months on end.

"Fan Man" fights for the right to fly. A Brooklyn man who was arrested Sunday for flying a “paramotor” over the city’s waterways argues his aircraft is perfectly legal. He’s fighting to get it back after it was seized by the NYPD.

Scooter rider’s death. Police this week arrested a Queens day care operator for driving without a license and obscuring her plate in connection with a crash that killed a 39-year-old scooter rider in Cambria Heights over the summer.

Bronx platform stabbing. The NYPD said a man was stabbed and seriously injured on the Bedford Park Boulevard B train platform Tuesday night.

Curious Commuter

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Question from Brian in Manhattan

The MTA has been installing platform barriers at numerous stations. However, it appears that the barriers are being installed along only half the length of the platform, and always positioned closest to the center of the platform. Notably, several stations have entrances situated at the far end of the platform, yet these areas lack barriers, despite being the busiest sections of the platform. This discrepancy warrants an explanation.

Answer

Last January, the MTA installed the first of these low-cost platform barriers at 191st Street in Washington Heights. It came after several high-profile attacks where riders were shoved onto subway tracks, including the murder of Michelle Go in 2022.

The MTA has since put the railings in at 98 stations — but only in the busiest parts of the platforms, and it’s expected to install two more before the end of the year.

“Platform barriers are placed in the middle of the platform to protect both riders and the conductor. Riders have the ability to walk to the center of the platform, while the conductor is almost always at the center,” MTA spokesperson Laura Cala-Rauch explained. “We will explore extending barriers to the full length of the platform in the future.”

The MTA had previously planned to install automated, sliding platform doors, like the ones in place at the JFK and Newark Airtrains, at three subway stations. The agency has not moved forward with that plan, instead opting for the lower-tech railings. The agency in 2019 commissioned an extensive study that found only 128 of the MTA’s 472 stations even had room for those modern platform doors.